Lately I’ve been spending some time at work digging through all the crap I’ve got laying around. Here’s a conversation related to this:
I’ve been working on a major overhaul of my weblog for the last couple of months. Among other things, this post serves to (hopefully) stave off going through this again for as long as possible.
When I had the first mostly-complete draft of this post put together, I thought I had a pretty good idea what the new setup was going to look like. This doesn’t look an awful lot like that version. That being said, my list of what I want the new system to do isn’t all that different than it was when I started.
So, in no particular order, here’s what I was looking for:
As far as I know, none of the systems out there do everything that I want, although some come close than others. I think #2, and therefore #1, conflicts with every hosted blogging service except for Tumblr. #3 conflicts with most non-hosted blogging software. #4 is a problem with some hosted blogging services, but not others. #5 conflicts with almost everything.
Unsurprisingly, not all of the desired features above occurred to me at the beginning of this process. I had been working on a custom system, but that doesn’t really fit with #3, since I would be doing all of the maintenance. Sure, I could build a system with no internet-accessible moving parts,1 but I would still be building just about everything myself.
I was looking mostly at hosted services — if I was going to use a traditional dynamically generated blogging package, it might as well be WordPress, which I was already using anyway. Being hosted services, they all satisfy the low maintenance requirement. Again, in no particular order:
Obviously, Tumblr was the leader of the hosted services. I think the only other major shortcoming was the lack of syntax highlighting. Sure, that wasn’t in my original list of requirements, but its awfully nice, and last I checked Gist hadn’t updated to a version of Pygments that does AppleScript.
In the end, I chose WordPress, with a different theme and almost an entirely different set of plugins than I started with. My new theme is a fairly simple Thematic child theme. The only custom plugin is a text formatter that I’ll probably release through the standard channels sooner or later.
The current version of WordPress does okay on the low maintenance requirement, since it can update itself and most plugins automatically. I have a lot less effort sunk into my theme than I used to, and I’m liking that. My text formatter still needs some work, but it gets the job done.
So, what did I learn in all of this? I honestly have no idea, but with any luck, I won’t forget it for a long time.
Indeed, this is exactly the sort of system I was was working on for a while.
↩If you didn’t watch last night’s daily show you really should — the interview with Jim Cramer is great.
Here’s a couple excerpts from the Stand-Up wishlist on my TiVo. Some of the stuff it finds is laughing so hard tears are running down my face funny, and some of it is just awful. Lins and I both loved this guy.
First, he explains how, exactly, we know elvis is dead:
This was his closer — its hilarious:
From Monday’s Colbert Report. You’ve got to be really secure in your audience to make a typography joke:
Once I really started trying to catch up, it look less than a day. Here are a few observations I made along the way:
Progressive lack of sleep1 combined with jetlag does not seem to help this process. The day that it took me only a small part of was Monday.
I’ve got quite a few feeds that can be disposed of quickly for various reasons:
Unsurprisingly, you notice how much material is repeated feed after feed far more when you’re reading most of a week’s items rather than a couple of hours worth.
At any rate, I’m back to my old daily process of asking myself why I’m subscribed to so many feeds that are full of crap.
I sort of “went dark” this week. I was in Los Angeles for a few exhibits we worked on for the LA Auto Show. We flew out Monday and returned Friday. At some point on Tuesday, I was definitely caught up in NetNewsWire for iPhone. By Friday morning it had been at least a couple of days.
Today, I started with over 3,700 items to read.
Here are my options on how to deal with this:
You could certainly argue that gathering that many items in a few days clearly indicates #3 be applied immediately,2 I’m starting out with #1 interleaved with the rest of my life because its the least destructive. More to come.
On Google Wave…sort of…
I may have had a bit of a revelation reading this Daring Fireball post:
At some point I realized that I tend to log into Facebook only when someone tells me I’ve come up in a conversation there. I tend to appreciate simple solutions to complex problems. Erwin was the last person I knew that hadn’t completely given up on IM; if you can’t say it on Twitter, send an email. IM might not be that complicated, but Twitter so simple that you can’t explain its appeal to someone. Facebook is sprawling.